Vladimir Lenin's

Basic Proposition on Economic and Especially on Banking Policy

Written:April 1918First Published:Lenin Miscellany XXI,
    1933Online Version:marx.org 1997; marxists.org 1999Transcribed:Conal
    TuohyHTML Markup:Brian
    BagginsandDavid WaltersCopyleft:V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marx.org) 2003. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of theGNU Free Documentation License

Completion of nationalisation of industry and
    exchange.Nationalisation of banks and gradual transition to socialism.Compulsory organisation of the population in consumer co-operative
    societies.{+Commodity exchange}Accounting and control of production and distribution of goods.Labour discipline.{+Tax policy}

Centralisation

Measures for transition to compulsory current accounts or to compulsory
    keeping of money in the banks.

Compulsory organisation of the population in consumer co-operative
    societies and measures for transition to this.

Conditions of an agreement with co-operators on gradual transition of
    their apparatus towards organisation of the whole population in consumer
    co-operative societies.

Compulsory labour service, begun from the top.

The most ruthless measures to combat chaos, disorder and idleness, and
    the most vigorous and severe measures for raising the discipline and
    self-discipline of the workers and peasants, are to be regarded as
    absolutely essential and urgent.

Conversion of state control into a real control for setting up mobile
    groups of controllers in all spheres of economic life.

Practical conditions concerning the employment of bourgeois
    intellectuals and saboteurs who express the desire to work with the Soviet
    government. Industrial courts for taking account of production, stocks of
    goods and labour productivity. (lmmediate and categorical.)

Completion of nationalisation of industry.

Gradual transition to organisation of one and all in consumer
    co-operatives and commodity exchange.

Banking policy.

Labour discipline and so forth.

Tax policy (finance).

1. Completion of the nationalisation of all factories, railways, means
    of production and exchange.

* Categorical and ruthless struggle agaiust the syndicalist and chaotic
    attitude to nationalised enterprises. Persistent carrying out of
    centralisation of economic life on a nationwide scale. Unremitting demand
    for preliminary plans and estimates, weekly reports and actual increase of
    labour productivity. Establishment and practical trial of the apparatus for
    managing the nationalised industries.

* The reason for this demand was that when certain enterprises were
    nationalised the staffs of these enterprises and certain trade unions had a
    tendency to regard the enterprise or branch of industry as belonging to the
    staff of the enterprise or to the trade union. Lenin was very much against
    such anarcho-syndicalist tendencies. When the question of water transport
    on the Volga was being discussed by the Council of People's Commissars on
    March 4, 1918, Lenin condemned the proposal to make the nationalised river
    craft the property of the trade unions of the various shipping lines and
    stressed that such aspirations had nothing in common with socialism. "The
    task of socialism," Lenin said, "is to make all the means of production the
    property of the whole people, and certainly not to have the ships handed
    over to the ship workers and the banks handed over to the bank
    workers."

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